The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. A search engine may assist a user in locating images, located on the web, that are similar to a query image.
Information retrieval systems, for example, Internet search engines, aim to identify resources, such as web pages, images, text documents, multimedia context, etc., that are relevant to a user's needs, and to present information about the resources in a manner that is most useful to the user. Internet search engines return a set of search results in response to a user submitted query. The search results identify resources responsive to a user's query. The identified resources can include varying types of content including documents, text, images, video, and audio.
In some information retrieval systems, a user can perform an image search. An image search is a search for image content responsive to an input query. An image can include a static graphic representative of some content, for example, photographs, drawings, computer generated graphics, advertisements, web content, book content. An image can also include a collection of image frames, for example, of a movie or a slideshow.